"I could have chosen any of the first three releases by Pixies – the Come On Pilgrim EP, Surfer Rosa or Doolittle. We bumped into Pixies when 'Sit Down' was number two in the charts. We were staying in the same hotel as them. I had seen them on TV and thought they were okay. I didn't get them totally but I thought they were pretty interesting. I went up to Black Francis at breakfast and introduced myself. We got talking for about half an hour and hit it off instantly. He invited me to a gig they were playing that night in London. I dragged two members of James, who had never heard of Pixies, to the show. We were up in the balcony chatting and not totally paying attention. I remember after about four songs, Saul [Davies] turning and saying, ""Have you been listening to this?"" He pushed us to the front of the balcony and we watched genius in front of our eyes. It was incredible – the arrangements, the vocals – Black Francis screams like no other singer – and beautiful subtlety within their post-punk songs. Pixies should have been as big as Nirvana, but never had a cute Kurt Cobain frontman. They were always one of the most ungainly-looking bands on the planet, but they made the most heavenly music as far as I was concerned. I love the surreal nature of the lyrics, that didn't quite make sense. I was a singer and I was all about making sense and communicating, and here was a band that seemed to do the opposite and the results were fantastic. That was quite revolutionary to me. Later, when we worked with Brian Eno on five albums, he would say to me ""stop making sense"" and I would think of the Talking Heads album of the same name, but I would also think of Pixies. With Pixies, not a large amount of people got them back then, as they were too ahead of their time. When Kurt Cobain said that in his perfect life he would have been born as the lead singer of Pixies, many people began to discover them. It meant that when they returned from their hiatus, they were bigger than they were previously as everyone had caught up to realise that Pixies were one of the most influential and important bands of all time. I got to know them a bit more and once went to see them play a tiny warm-up gig in London. I went backstage and was talking to Black Francis about screaming. I was asking how he did it, because when I tried, it wrecked my voice and I couldn't sing. He told me that a Puerto Rican man, who was a chef in a crappy restaurant in California, taught him how to scream. He then tried to teach me. At the time, he failed. I can scream a bit more now, but I think I was born more of a crooner."

"Christy Moore is one of my mum’s favourite artists and I listened to this so much growing up. He had a record, Live at the Point, which we would always listen to on journeys around Ireland and Irish music was the first music I experienced live. My mum was born in Dublin, we would go to Galway and go in taverns all the time and it soundtracked my childhood. “I just recently fell in love and ‘Black is the Colour’ was the song that I really liked and listening to it recently I felt like I was like inside romance. I was like, ‘Ah, I’m so in love right now’ [laughs]. I’ve been quite starved of romance for a really long time and I felt I was in it. I was ‘God, this is so romantic and this is just kind of fucking insane’. I’d forgotten the importance of it and how much I wanted it, so that’s why I put the song in here. “If you get the Live at the Point version, at the beginning he says that he’d heard this beautiful song by this guy and at the end he’s ‘gimme that song!’ He wants it and I love that, that’s so cute - that’s what this is about, it’s sharing stories. Christy Moore heard this guy sing this beautiful song and he’s ‘Come on, give it to me, I want to play that tune, I want people to feel that way’ and how beautiful is that? “I’m Irish, so folk is my origin, sharing songs, telling stories and someone else passing on that story. I’ve been really looking into folklore in the past year, that’s one of the reasons that I really wanted to go to Ireland because I was ‘I need to find a record that’s related to this, this is my culture and this is where I grew up.’ As a kid I played the tin whistle and the Bodhrán. I was winning trophies for Irish dancing, I spent my holidays there and I went around playing in fucking fields with cows. And yeah, I’ve been researching fairies and mythology, I love it so much. “There’s so much ancient, beautiful, really respected and protected traditional stuff in Ireland. The traditional aspect can be so cool, there’s so many amazing musicians that just go down to the pub and play and it’s like breathing to them. I stayed in this little hotel with eight rooms in a town called Kilkee, it was in a bay, it was so cute and there was a family playing music in the pub. There was an eight year old boy just staring off, he was playing the accordion and it was so natural - just a bored eight year old that is a fucking genius and has no idea. And then if someone sang an old traditional song a cappella, everyone in the pub would go silent. It was like a movie or something."

"I mentioned Johnny's record store, and as well as Suicide, which is ironic considering he killed himself, he got me to listen to Nick Drake. This is such a perfect record, the songs are perfect, the singing's perfect, the instrumentation (even though Phil Collins plays on the songs) is perfect. It was one of those records that didn't need any explaining. I walked in, it was playing, and I asked 'what's this?', I thought it maybe was a Cat Stevens b-side. He told me it was Nick Drake and that I should buy it and he gave me a discount on the record because he was such an evangelist for it, and thought it was one of the best records ever made and that people needed to learn about Nick Drake. I took it home and fell in love with it. It's been a constant for me ever since. I can't imagine a month of my life that's gone by that I've not listened to it. The funniest experience was the first real tour I did, in 1991, with the band The Shamen. It was the first electronic music rave tour of the States, and at the time I didn't drink, I didn't do drugs, I was a very naive little kid and I was on tour with the Shamen, who were all really partying quite hard. I think we liked and respected each other, but we didn't really have anything in common apart from a shared love of electronic music. One day I was in the back of the lounge listening to Nick Drake's Bryter Layter and the singer came back and you could see his face lit up, and you could see he was a huge Nick Drake fan. We bonded over that. The next tour I did was with the Prodigy and Richie Hawtin, and the one after that was with Orbital and the Aphex Twin. During these tours there was a rave scene in the early 90s, but compared to the UK it was much smaller. It certainly existed. One of the reasons why the rave scene in the States is how it is, is because a lot of the people involved do way too many drugs. You get these DJs and performers who get really into the rave scene and then do more drugs in one night than most human beings should in a lifetime, so the burn-out rate is pretty high. In 1996 I was dating this raver girl, and she had gone out and did three hits of ecstasy, three hits of ketamine, some acid and crystal meth and I just remember thinking 'how can your body handle that?' But I guess if you're 19 years old it can handle it for a little while. Definitely that type of drug use led to a lot of people burning out"